The Shirt On His Back (22 page)

'He may not be
callin' himself Boden up here.'

Manitou reined
in sharply: 'Boden?'

'That's his
name,' said Shaw. 'Frank Boden.'

The trapper was
silent for a moment; for the first time January saw the animal watchfulness
disappear from his eyes, leaving them, for an instant, blank. Shocked, as if
thought had been arrested midstream, leaving him uncertain which direction to
go. But this was only for an instant. Then Wildman shook his head, said in a
strange voice, 'I didn't know.'

He reined away
into the woods without another word.

'I ain't no
ghoul.' Clarke came back from his mules, looking after Wildman as the big
trapper disappeared into the shadows of the trees.

"Course you
ain't.'

'He should damn
well talk about goddam ghouls! God Hisself couldn't keep track of how many
hides an' horses that child's had off the Flatheads -
and
I didn't notice
that deer- hide shirt he was wearin' was part of his plunder back at the camp.
An' I know for a fact them leggins he's got on was took off some poor Crow up
on the Bighorn—'

'It's a fact
ever'body gets what they can, where they can,' replied Shaw soothingly. 'An'
like I said, Mr Incognito don't care who's wearin' his boots now. You comin',
Maestro?'

'Yes, just
coming.' January went to kick out the campfire, then stooped to examine the
ashes. From the charred earth, he picked a fragment of wood. With the back of
his knife - the earth was scorching hot - he dug out two or three more, as if
playing jackstraws. Clarke and Frye had already started off up the steep
northern slope of the coulee. Shaw waited, still as a scarecrow on his yellow
gelding, watching and listening all around him as January scooped up his rifle
and followed. He said nothing as January stowed the half- burned splinters
inside his watch case, the only hard metal container he had which didn't
already hold either powder or lucifers, but the tilt of his eyebrows told
January that the policeman had guessed what he'd found.

What it meant,
of course, was an entirely different matter.

Given the fact
that the Blackfeet - whatever their relationship with Wildman - would
certainly carry to its conclusion the operations they'd begun on Wildman last
night on a couple of lone whites who
weren't
their brothers,
Shaw slipped on ahead on foot to scout the rim of the coulee before anyone else
came out of its cover. About two miles lay between Small Bear and the next
coulee - Dry Grass or Rotten Cow, depending on who you talked to, said Clarke -
open ground in which it would have been almost impossible to evade Blackfoot
warriors. The sun stood halfway between the eastern mountains and mid-heaven,
and from one hill slope January could see across the glittering green sheet of
the river the beginnings of the rendezvous camp, like a scattering of little
villages beyond the rim of the cottonwoods.

'Clem's gonna
scalp me,' muttered Clarke. 'Lettin' myself get caught like a damn pork-eater—'

'He won't,'
promised Frye jauntily. He seemed to have put completely behind him the enigma
of Manitou Wildman's visit with the Blackfeet. "Cause I'll be headin' out
with you - it's just me, I don't have a partner or nuthin' - an' when we get to
your valley I'll trap just where you say, an' keep outta your way—'

'Yeah, an' the
other way he won't is if him and me scalp
you - an'
them,' he
added, with a truculent glance over his shoulder at January and Shaw.

'You'd still
have to catch Wildman,' pointed out January, 'and shut
his
mouth, too. You
really think you're up to that?'

'What the hell
you know, nigger?' muttered Clarke, but in a tone that told January he had him,
there.

January glanced
back to make some remark to Shaw and almost jumped in surprise: Morning Star
rode at Shaw's side, leading January's big liver-bay from the camp and Bo
Frye's mule and his rat-tailed paint. He reined back to join them. 'You know
anything about Manitou Wildman and the Blackfeet, m'am?' he asked.

'I know he is
their brother.'

'And is that a
reason for them to torture him - and then turn him loose? Those were healing
herbs he was drinking. My sister's a shaman -'
well, a voodooienne, anyway
- 'and I know the smell. But a bowl of poppy and willow bark isn't sufficient
reason for pretending they didn't lay a hand on him. At least, it isn't for
me.'

'Crazy Bear is a
strange man.'

Clarke and Frye
swung around in their saddles, 'What the
hell—
?'

'Where'd she
come from?'

'Dropped down
outta the sky,' returned Shaw mildly. 'Horses an' all. Beauty, you know Mornin'
Star?'

'Yeah, Sefton's
squaw.'

Frye asked a
rapid question in sign, which January guessed concerned the Blackfeet, because
Morning Star smiled and pointed up Small Bear Coulee. She added - doubling her
quick- moving hands with French for his benefit - 'I have seen nothing of the
other tribe, nor of the Indian Agent that Broken Hand was sent out to find. Nor
have I seen any trace of the dead man's camp,' she added, 'which I think
strangest of all . . .'

She lifted her
head sharply, and at the same moment January heard it: the frenzied whinnying
of horses in the draw ahead. January's eyes went instantly to the morning sky:
buzzards and ravens circling. Clarke whispered, 'Jesus—'

And whipped up
his horse.

Shaw and January
followed at a canter, over the rim and down into Dry Grass Coulee. Dry Grass
was shallower than Small Bear, and there was less timber. From the high ground,
January saw the Dutchman's camp at once. A cold camp, and a dry one, since
there was no stream here in summer. Through the trees he discerned packs and blankets
on the ground, and crumpled things that could only be bodies. Something gray
moved among them; he heard the quarrelsome snarls of wolves.

No wonder the
tied horses were terrified.

The smell hit
him then, foul in the clean mountain air, and prickled the hair on his head. He
shouted, 'Stop!' and saw already that the Beauty had drawn rein, smelling it
also and uncertain—

'Christ Jesus,'
whispered Clarke, when Shaw and January came up to him. 'What the hell
happened? It smells like a fucken plague hospital down there.'

Even at a
distance of two hundred yards, it was very clear that everyone in the camp had
died purging and puking.

Morning Star
rode past them, crossed the bottom of the coulee and put her spotted Nez Perce
horse up the opposite slope to circle the camp. While they were waiting for
her, Bo Frye came up with the mule string, pale with shock under his tan.

Curious, thought
January, that this young man didn't find anything odd in playing tag with
Blackfeet eleven months out of the year, with death by torture a daily
possibility, yet his voice trembled at the thought of disease.

Maybe because
once the First Horseman took you, your knife or your rifle or your wits would
do nothing to slither you out of his cold white grip.

'You don't think
it's the cholera, do you?' Frye whispered.

'I'll know
better when we're close.' He brought up his rifle and shot at one of the
wolves. The buzzards flapped skyward with a dark whoosh; the wolves backed away
snarling, then flickered out of sight into the brush. Clarke kept whispering,
'Christ Jesus, Christ Jesus
. . .' as if the words were a kind of lifeline, to keep him from being swept
away by the fact that the people he'd been closest to for the past five years
of his life all lay before him, dead.

And had died - January
could see - very badly indeed.

Clemantius Groot
- clothed in a handsome black frock- coat - lay on his blankets, which were
stiff with vomit. Beside him Fingers Woman was curled up, as if she'd died
clutching her belly, her face pressed to his shoulder. Frye's whisper was edged
with panic: 'My grandpa died like that. Yellow fever, in Boston in '93 . . .'

'The vomit's the
wrong color.' January had worked plague wards, both in Paris and New Orleans.
This was bad - four men and a woman, crumpled and twisted where they had
fallen, two with faces and bellies torn open by the wolves. But nothing to what
he had seen. 'And yellow fever doesn't kill in a night.' He dismounted, his
borrowed mare fidgeting her feet and thrashing her head at the smell of death.

'But the cholera
does, don't it?'

'Yes.' He was a
little surprised at how detached his voice sounded, though, oddly, it seemed to
steady the frightened young man beside him. 'Cholera can kill in a night.'

Or a day. He had
made love to his beautiful Ayasha, early one hot morning in the cholera summer
in Paris, kissed her - not an instant of that day had left his memory, nor
would it, he knew, until he died, his love for Rose notwithstanding
...
He had walked
down the twisty stairs of that old tall house on the Rue de l'Aube and along
those gray medieval streets where moss grew between the cobbles, to the plague
hospital where he was working . . .

He could even
remember the song the two children at the corner had been singing as they
bounced their ball against the wall.

'Dans la for
ê
t lointaine

On entend le coucou

Du haut de son grand ch
ê
ne

II r
é
pond au hibou:

"Coucou, coucou . . ."
'

And she'd been
dead, when he'd come back to the room about half an hour before the setting of
the sun.

He
shook himself. If he let it, the thought would devour him. It had paralyzed him
for months after that day - which still felt exactly as if it were yesterday.
Even if it was yesterday, today
is today . . . And today we have five people dead in a coulee in the middle of
the Oregon Territory and no way of knowing whether the contagion has already
spread like wildfire over the rendezvous camp
. . .

He took a breath
and said, 'The stools are wrong.'

'You can tell
what they died of from lookin' at their
crap
?'
Goshen
Clarke grimaced, oddly revolted - particularly for a man who engaged in the
competition-swallowing of raw buffalo-guts.

'For some
diseases, yes. Cholera's one of them.'

Among the
bodies, cups and kettles lay, two of them that had been set down still upright
containing a little water. Thirst could mean fever . . .

Standing at the
edge of the camp, holding the horses, Shaw's face had a cold stillness to it.
He'd been in and out of the plague wards, too - January had seen him there. And
had gone into more than one small house in New Orleans, or those small rooms
behind shops and groceries and livery stables - only to see the whole family,
father, mother, children dead. As his own family had died, leaving only Johnny
and Tom.

'Could it be
somethin' they et?' Frye tagged at January's heels like a child as he went from
body to body; as he knelt to feel faces and hands, though he knew if they'd
made camp sometime before dark they'd be cool and only beginning to stiffen.
'Woman that lived behind us on Water Street bought something in the market she
thought was juneberries and made a pie of it for her family. All seven of 'em
died, and for a couple days the whole neighborhood thought that it might be
some sickness from down the wharves.'

'It could be.'
January raised the eyelid of one of the engages, but saw nothing unusual in the
dilated pupils, the glazed whites. 'Though I can't see Fingers Woman baking a
pie.' He straightened up, then walked the whole of the camp again, observing
everything, touching as little as he could.

Morning Star,
ever practical, had already taken the thirst- crazed horses further down the
draw, to where someone had dug in the sand of the creek bed yesterday evening.
The hole was now filled with water from the sunken stream. Clarke stood as
close as he dared get to his partner and his partner's Indian wife - perhaps
ten feet - staring at them as if he still didn't believe what he was seeing.